Brave words. He might have to send them sneaking back to where they had come from.
Presently, Ragnar Stenka Locks returned with a large plastic sack attached to his back and one held by hand. This he gave to Duncan to carry. Shortly thereafter, the last of the band, Fiona Van Dindan, straggled in. Her form-fitting electric-blue gown had been exchanged for a yellow tee shirt and Lincoln-green shorts. Locks told the two children that they must be quiet and do whatever they were told, though their parents had already done this. Wide-eyed and grave-faced, they nodded that they would. Locks kissed them on the tops of their heads and said, “I know you will. You’ve been through this before.”
As he turned away, Duncan, who could read lips, saw him mutter, “Hell of a life for kids.”
With the brothers, Sinn and Bedeutung, walking about twenty feet ahead of the band as scouts, they all went down the hallway. Duncan wondered what the organics would do when they broke through into the chambers. They would know at once that they had been recently occupied and would try to chase the refugees down. Undoubtedly, by then, the outlaws would be safely hidden someplace. At least, he hoped they would. He whispered to Wilde, who was walking beside him, “Does this happen often?”
“Last time was about seven submonths ago. We got away OK, but they filled in the chambers and halls with dirt for two miles. It only took us two months to empty them again. Gave us something to do.”
After a mile of winding tunnels, their way lit by electric torches, the band had to get down on hands and knees and crawl for about a quarter of a mile. This narrow pipe traversed, they were able to stand up again. The padre, who was the rear guard, rolled a circular door from the recesses across the entrance. He dropped a bar across it but said, “Won’t take them long to burn through that.”
After going down another hallway, they turned to the left and went down a straight corridor for about sixty feet. Here it seemed to end; dirt had spilled out onto the floor from the caved-in wall. Bedeutung and several others used shovels to remove the wet damp earth for several feet and to reveal a small round section of wood. Bedeutung pried it open with a little crowbar. A narrow shaft with a wooden ladder lay under the trap door. All filed down the ladder, the padre the last to enter. He had piled dirt around and on top of the door, and when he closed it above him, dirt, it was hoped, would cover the door.
By the light of the torches, the band went down along a down-angling tunnel, their shoes muddied by earth mixed with water. Here Duncan saw the first of the many human bones and skulls he was to note along the route.
“There were a lot of bones in the area we went through,” Wilde said to Duncan. “We’ve cleaned them out, but I think we should have left them there. They made the areas look unoccupied.”
Duncan saw, now and then, masses of rusted metal.
“Arrowheads, swords, spears, proton guns,” Wilde said. “The Americans put up a hell of a fight, but they lost. The underground forts were sealed up and monuments put over them. Outlaws reopened them a long time ago. Most of the monuments above in the preserve have been neglected; you still come across them half-buried, surrounded by trees.”
Occasionally, the wall looked as if it had been half-melted. These areas were darker than the light brown of the other areas.
“Flamethrowers did that,” Wilde said. He shuddered. “It must have been awful.”
They came to the end of the metallic-looking material. From there, a tunnel had been dug through the rock and earth and braced with wooden beams and uprights. This led straight for fifty feet. At its end was a pile of large rocks. Sinn removed some to expose a trap door. Moving air flowed from the shaft, very welcome to the band, who had begun to suffer from the hot, unmoving, oxygen-poor air. After going down a rusty metal ladder, the band passed through a long passageway made up of some rubbery stuff interspersed with hand-dug tunnels. The air, Wilde said, came from a machine connected to a narrow pipe that ran from the tunnel and curved up into a hollow tree. The air-conditioner had no moving parts and was run off a wheel driven by falling water in a nearby natural cave. This did not generate much electricity, but it was enough.
Locks ordered a rest. Thankfully, all sat down except the leader and Bedeutung. These went back down the tunnel. Sinn applied a large disc attached by a wire to a small black box attached to his belt. He listened through earphones for a while, then took them off. “Nothing above that I can hear,” he said.
Duncan drank from a canteen he took from his pack. He had no sooner put it back than the earth trembled under him, a roaring came from the far end of the tunnel, and some dust swirled from it. Locks and Bedeutung appeared from the cloud. The leader’s teeth shone white in his begrimed face.
“The shaft’s plugged up,” he said. “They won’t be able to follow us.”
“Yeah, and we can’t go back if the organics block us off ahead,” Wilde muttered.
Crossant, sitting close enough for Duncan to smell him, said, “We shouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Whine, whine, little dog,” Wilde snarled. “God, I get tired of your bitching.”
“Shut up, you…you it!” Crossant snarled back.
“Ah, ha!” Wilde cried. “I knew you were prejudiced.”
“All of you, quiet!” Locks said.
“Yes,” the padre rumbled. “There comes a time when head-knocking is in order, God forgive me for saying so. We have more weighty issues at hand than your childish bickering. Throttle down or get throttled.”
Wilde got up and went to a place distant from Crossant to sit down. Duncan followed him. He said, “Dong and Crossant, what’s their background?”
“Their story, you mean? Why’re they here?”
Wilde chuckled.
“It’s not because of political principle. They’re petty thieves, well, maybe not so petty. They were Wednesday’s citizens, and he was a TV producer, game shows, and she was his executive secretary. Then he got this stupid idea, he’s not very bright, to fix it for some contestants to win if they paid him off. Dong was his live-in, and he talked her into collaborating with him. They did all right for a while. The contestants split their prizes with him. Or, if the prize was extra credits, they transferred half of those to him.
“The inevitable happened. Crossant’s superior caught on to what was happening. He confronted him and said he’d not turn him in if he and Dong split with him. He also wasn’t very bright. Crossant got mad, attacked him, and knocked him out. He and Dong were caught dragging the unconscious man across the roof of their apartment building. They must’ve intended to drop him over the edge, make it look like an accident. More stupidity. The organics would’ve used the truth mist on every suspect; in fact, on anybody who was involved in the game show.
“The woman who caught them was the building manager. She stopped them and then started downstairs to report them. Crossant and Dong compounded their crime by knocking her out. By then it was apparent even to them that they’d gotten in too deep. So, instead of taking their lumps, a trial, a sentence to a rehabilitation institution with maybe freedom in a few years, they fled. We found them wandering in the woods starving and just about ready to turn themselves in to the ganks.”
“Why did you take them in?”
“We take in anybody who’s on the run. That’s our inflexible rule. If it wasn’t, they’d not have let me in. I’m not a political refugee either.”
“But those two are potential murderers. The only thing that stopped them was being observed in the act.”
Wilde shrugged. “Everybody’s a potential murderer. I’ve thought of killing Dong and Crossant. But, of course…”
“Fantasizing murder isn’t the same thing as doing it.”
“No. But those two were in a peculiar, a unique, situation. They won’t be in it again. And, maybe, they’ve learned their lesson. However, it’s an axiom that TV people never learn by experience.”
Locks gave the order to push on. Sinn had reported that he could detect no aboveground noise. His d
etector was not sensitive enough to record the ordinary sounds of the woods, bird calls, people walking on the ground. It could register any drilling.
While they were traveling through the tortuous, sometimes dangerous passages, Duncan had to ask Wilde something that had been bothering him since their conversation.
“Any group, even outlaws, has to have rules and laws for its own organization. What do you do with those who create such dissension that you just can’t put up with them? What do you do to someone who’s killed someone in your group? What’re the punishments for crime?”
Wilde snorted, and he said, “Oh, we do what we so vigorously protest against the government’s doing. We stone them.”
Duncan said, “Ah!” and was silent thereafter for a long time. Where would the band have access to a big stoner?
6
After passing slowly through a labyrinth of caverns, crawling sometimes, wading up to their waists in swift-moving, icy, and numbing water, they entered another tunnel complex. Some sections of these were separated at their junctions because the two great earthquakes of ancient times had moved them apart. This band, or perhaps previous outlaws, had dug through and shored up the spaces between the ends of the great pipes. After walking for three hours, they went through a pipe that ended in another natural cave abounding in stalactites and stalagmites. Here they stopped for the night. They drank from a small stream winding Styx-like through the darkness, ate cold food, and then got into sleeping bags. The floor was rough, sloping, and hard, but they slept soundly.
Duncan’s turn at watch came an hour before the others were to get up, so he did not slip back into his bag. A half-hour after renewing their journey, they were back in another cave complex and wading in a corridor with flowing water up to their ankles. Wilde explained that the stream had been deliberately diverted from a cavern creek into the complex.
“The water will remove our tracks and the odor molecules associated with it.”
“But they’ll figure we used the stream to do this,” Duncan said. “So they’ll just follow the stream.”
“Yes, but what stream? The flow is channeled through all the side exits along this hall. Besides…”
He did not finish. Perhaps that was because he knew that Duncan would soon see what he had intended to say. Before they got to the end of the hall, Sinn turned into a room, and the others followed. Duncan stood with them while his feet became even more numb and blue in the water. Sinn and Bedeutung opened a wall section, revealing a palely lit closet. Its back section swung out to give entrance to another cavern. Beyond a stretch of stalagmites and stalactites, its water looking black, was a small river at least fifty feet wide. The band followed along its course while their feet sloshed and froze and drops of icy water fell on their heads. Duncan’s teeth began to chatter.
Presently, they came to a dam made of large rocks over which the stream boiled and whirled. They climbed up alongside it on rocks forming a very rough staircase. Before they reached its top, twenty feet high, they were drenched with Water that struck the rocks and soared up and over them.
“God, if we don’t die of shock, we’ll die of pneumonia!” Crossant muttered.
“That’s all right,” Wilde said. “You need a bath.”
“How’d you like me to shove you into the river?” Crossant snarled.
“I’d loathe even that minor contact with you,” Wilde said, grinning.
When Duncan got to the top, he stopped for a moment to wait for those behind. “Who built this dam?” he said to Wilde.
The padre, hearing him, said, “Who knows? Some of the earlier outlaws. Maybe a thousand obyears ago, maybe only a hundred. In any event, we owe them thanks and blessings.”
“Why?”
“You’ll find out very soon.”
Sinn and Bedeutung had gone ahead. By the time the rest caught up with them, they were pulling together on a huge, heavily painted steel lever projecting from a slot in the cave wall. Locks ordered two men to add their weight, and the lever slowly traveled down to the bottom of the slot. While it was descending, the rock floor began to tremble. When the lever was all the way down, the floor was shaking, and a roaring came up from beneath it or someplace close to it.
Wilde, his teeth clicking, his body shaking, said, “Watch the river.”
Others had their lights directed on it. Duncan saw the water sinking slowly. After a few minutes, its level was a foot lower and the noise and trembling beneath him had lessened.
“The tunnel complex is now flooded,” Wilde said, grinning and shivering. “They won’t be able to follow us. In fact, if all goes as we hope, they’ll think the tunnels have been flooded for some time. Depends on how close they were behind us.”
Duncan thought that the people who had constructed this trap must have taken a long time to do it. They had had enormous patience, had labored hard, and probably lost lives while building it.
“When we go back, we’ll lower the buried gates and wait until the water runs out of the complex,” Wilde said.
“If we get a chance to go back,” Mika Dong said.
“You’re just brimming over with high morale, aren’t you? It’s such a pleasure working with you through thick and thin.”
“One of these days…” Crossant said.
Locks ordered the band to move on. The children, who had not complained openly but had been whimpering, were now covered with blankets brought from their parents’ waterproof knapsacks. Duncan envied them. After ten minutes of wet and slippery passage, however, they climbed down a shaft made of vertical pipes. Rungs secured with rusty screws were spaced along the wall.
“Our forerunners had to carve this tunnel with great care,” Wilde said. “They couldn’t use heavy equipment because of the noise. It must have taken them a hell of a long time. How they did it without getting caught, we’ll never know.”
The tunnel went straight for three hundred feet, ending in a room just large enough to hold the band comfortably. Part of it was filled with boxes of supplies and a large black metal box attached to a cable. The cable ran into the rock wall.
Sinn pushed a button on a thick metal plate on one wall. Light filled the chamber. Several opened the boxes and brought out smaller containers, long and flat. They put thirty of these into the large metal box and pressed the controls on its panel. A second later, they removed the boxes to reveal trays full of food and bottles. These were placed, four at a time, inside the microwave oven on a table nearby. Though there were no tables or chairs for their dinner, no one complained. The food was hot and good, and the bottles provided wine and beer.
Duncan, his mouth full, spoke to Wilde. “How did you manage to tap into a power cable?”
“We didn’t. The setup was as you see it. Our unsung heroes and heroines did it before we came along.”
“But the power loss? Won’t it be indicated at the control headquarters? It’ll be traced…”
“Might be,” Wilde said cheerfully. “But the power is taken off the system up there.” He waved a fork at the ceiling. “You’ll see why the monitors don’t pay any particular attention to it.”
Duncan decided to be content with this partial explanation. The electric heater in one corner was making him warm, and he was feeling sleepy. After he ate, he put the dirty tray into a large barrel and went into the narrow toilet unit in a far corner of the room. This also used electric power, stoning the wastes. These would be removed from the lower part of the unit and stacked in a corner for later removal.
He slept soundly in his bag and woke on Thursday. Though he was a Tuesday native, he knew that the organics of each day would be continuing the search. The days had a minimum of communication, but his case would demand that Wednesday leave a message for Thursday organics, and they would pass it on to Friday. And Friday would send it on to Saturday and so on.
Duncan was not surprised when a ladder was put up alongside a wall and Sinn opened a section of the ceiling. Sinn, carrying his sound detector, went up the lad
der and through the opening. Five minutes later, he was back.
“No sign of activity. Looks clear.”
The shaft above the ceiling was about forty feet high and so narrow that even if you slipped on the rungs you could brace your back against one wall and your feet on the other. The entire group went up, Duncan seventh from the lead. He came out into an enormous chamber, the ceiling sixty feet above him. Since no one had told him what to expect, he was startled. Thousands of silent figures in hundreds of rows extending as far as he could see stood in the room. Men, women, and children, lined as if for dress parade, though all were nude, some with open eyes, some with closed eyes. Around the neck of each was a cord from which hung a plaque. These bore the names of the stoned and the ID, biographical, and medical data in code.
Duncan needed no explanations. This was an underground government warehouse that stored those who had been stoned for various reasons. Among them would be people who had been dying of incurable diseases and had opted for stoning. Someday, when medical science could cure them, they would be destoned and given treatment. At least, that was the theory.
There would also be people who had died but had been immediately stoned. When the means for resurrecting them and curing them were available, they would be brought out of the warehouse. Or so they had been promised.